In an elegant group show at Minus Space, "Neither Here nor There but Anywhere and Everywhere," curator Matthew Deleget has selected work that looks visually simple, but each piece tells a deeper story about camouflage, subterfuge, and the act of making art. Rooted in stripped-down Minimalist aesthetics and the work of the 1960s French Supports/Surfaces artists who focused on deconstructing the materials (canvas and stretchers) rather than creating an illusion with paint, the pieces in the Minus Space exhibition use materials as image, illusion, and metaphor.

Carrie Pollack, Soft Sky, 2012, pigment ink on canvas, 34 x 24 inches. Simultaneously evoking both presence and absence, Pollack prints an image--a photograph of a clear blue sky that's been converted to greyscale--on a loosely stretched canvas. Or is the the printed image, which makes the canvas look like unprimed linen, creating the illusion of looseness?

Neither Here nor There but Anywhere and Everywhere highlights reductive, primarily monochromatic works spanning or hybridizing multiple media. This includes objects that merge drawing into sculpture, print into painting, painting into ceramics, and more. Each of the 7 exhibiting artists takes a candid, probing approach to their chosen medium, unpacking its art historical framework, examining precedent artistic strategies, and subverting viewer expectations. A wide array of primary materials, such as paper, wood, fabric, ink, porcelain, and steel, are presented in the exhibition. Another key aspect in the works is color, which in most cases is not applied, but rather a given, originating in the raw materials themselves.

Although seemingly straightforward in appearance, many of the works on view - for example, Julian Dashper's cut painting stretcher Untitled (2002), Vincent Como's Sumi ink cube 4.5 Cubic Inches (Volume of the Inside of My Head), and Victoria Munro's cast porcelain painting OR, THE WHALE - are not what they appear to be at first glance and require closer inspection by the viewer.

MINUS SPACE is delighted to announce the exhibition Carrie Pollack: Witness. This is the Brooklyn-based artist’s first solo exhibition in New York and it will feature a suite of new paintings consisting of digital prints on linen.

Carrie Pollack describes her work as “a catalog of her memories”. In it she examines what we as individuals consciously or unconsciously choose to remember, and how our memories of people, places, and events degrade and change over time. Begun after the death of her father in 2009, Pollack’s new paintings are both poetic and existential, and they investigate the notions of permanence and impermanence, as well as uncertainty and contradiction. She deliberately intends her paintings to function “more as conversations than as statements”. Her imagery can often appear both familiar and unknown at the same time spanning both abstraction and representation.

The source materials of Pollack’s new paintings can be found in long meditative walks she takes daily with her dog around her Greenpoint, Brooklyn neighborhood. She carries her camera with her religiously, which she uses as a research tool to record the fleeting nature of her immediate environment. Each day Pollack takes dozens of photographs, which as of late have focused on deteriorating advertising posters, faded graffiti tags, vacant lots, worn textiles, and the fleeting quality of the sky, as well as other elements in transition and flux.

Pollack in turn organizes her photographs – now numbering in the thousands – into several distinct categories: posters, skies, newspapers, and textiles, among others. She spends weeks pouring over her images, intuitively arranging and rearranging them, looking for shared relationships between them. Once she identifies an image of essential interest, Pollack reduces it down to gray-scale in Photoshop, occasionally adjusting its contrast if needed to bring the image into a neutral state. She then prints upwards of one hundred test images with her large-format printer onto a wide array of supports, including newsprint, paper, canvas, and linen. The printing process is intentionally laden with glitches and hiccups, which she readily embraces. She remarks that the technology “adds its own interpretation of the image”, which reflects the way one’s mind continually tries to understand, interpret, and find meaning in the past, present, and future.

In the concluding steps of her process, Pollack prints a final image onto linen in a size that is unequal – sometimes larger, sometimes smaller – to the dimensions of the painting stretcher that will support it. As a result, the printed image often appears misaligned at first glance. Sometimes an image will wrap around the sides of the stretcher bars and onto the back the painting. Other times an image will be completely isolated within a much larger field of raw linen on the surface of the painting. These choices starkly contrast the digital quality of the image with the physical materiality of the painting itself, which directly parallels and exemplifies the complexity of memory.

Review: “Between This Light and That Space”
A group show in which less serves up a whole lot of more. By Sarah Schmerler

Summer group shows. Have you noticed how 90 percent of them include too much work? Enter Minus Space, and you’ll see how hot-weather curating ought to be done: with a philosophy of less is more. Douglas Melini, an abstract painter with an eye for weird confluences of geometry, texture and pattern, has picked 11 works by seven artists. His selections are as intuitive as they are spot-on, and the space practically hums with a soft, yet satisfying, optical buzz.

Installation artist Elana Herzog surprises by offering discrete, stand-alone works. One of the smallest features a shape that looks like the African continent, festooned with fluffy mountain ranges made of fabric. In Palma Blank’s Grey, Purple Diagonals with Yellow Cut-Out, shapes seem to magically float and shift from foreground to background. Michelle Grabner employs spray-on flocking and enamel paint to achieve one X-shaped composition—a weirdly compelling duel between fuzzy blanket and hard grid. Carrie Pollack steals the show, quietly, with a b&w digital print on canvas of a subject as simple as the sky. Meanwhile, hanging from the ceiling’s center is a gently rotating mirrored mobile by Anne Eastman. It further reflects and refracts everything in this already trippy show.

Did we mention that women artists make up the entire exhibit? That’s a rebalance more male curators should take notice of.